On A.I., Google Search, and the Internet We Want
- Jon Ekstrom
- 12 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Back in 2000, four years before Google’s IPO, cofounder Larry Page mused in an interview that “artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google.” In his vision, “It would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.”
That’s from an article by Katie Baker on The Ringer called “The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It” that’s both exceptional (Katie Baker does consistently great work) and also a huge bummer. As someone who has been creating content on the internet since spring of 2000 (in the year 2000!), I’ve lived through several iterations of the internet and this one definitely sucks the most. It’s not going to get better, and we’ll get there in a minute. But first, I want to pause for a moment and focus on that quote from Larry Page by referencing something else in the article.
Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video—although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing the days when it was mining more fertile and open ground.
I’ve trafficked in some Blockbuster nostalgia before, although not for the entity itself because Blockbuster was simultaneously puritanical and predatory (two qualities I profoundly loathe), but for the way going to the video store used to feel. Maybe you went to the video store knowing exactly what you were looking for. Maybe you found it right away and then maybe you went home and watched it immediately. Successful outing!
Or maybe your experience was more like that of Kurt Vonnegut telling his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
And that’s what Larry Page and most of these techbro fuckwits don’t understand and why his ideal vision of how Google search would work is so fundamentally flawed. It’s why Pandora as a music platform ultimately sucks. Yeah, it feeds me an endless conveyor belt of stuff I already like into my pried-open maw, but I don’t actually want that. I already know what I like and can program my own playlist myself. I have taste, a brain, and can work my music platform just fine. I don’t need a fucking robot to do it for me. If I find my music stale, I’ll ask any of my weirdo art homies what they’re listening to and get a whole slate of dope new shit to consume.
It’s also not why I went to Blockbuster (or, I suppose, a good video store before Blockbuster ran them all out of business). I went with an idea. Or a mood. An inkling. A flavor in mind. Maybe a genre. You go to a section of the video store, you see something you like, you point it out to whoever you’re with. They have an opinion about it. You like the same actor. Even better, you HATE the same actor! You look at whatever’s next to it. What’s this? Oh, I’ve heard of this. Who’s the director? That director rules! Holy shit, who is in this cast?! How have I never heard of this??? Ok, we gotta get this! What else is around here? Let’s search some more – oh shit, look at that cool horror movie box!
Vonnegut understood that the joy is in the journey. His outing is not about the envelope because the envelope is but a convenient clothesline upon which to hang a low-stakes adventure. It’s an excuse to just DO SOME SHIT. When I wrote my master’s thesis, I would frequently come across some book I would need to make whatever point I was trying to make. Inevitably, that book would be checked out. But I would always see where it was in the library because, thanks to understanding the basic purpose and architecture of the Dewey Decimal System, I knew there would be books I had never even considered in that same section of the library that would probably be even more helpful than the one I initially sought.
That’s why Google search is fucked, and why AI is even worse. It’s robbing us of that journey, and without that journey, we’re basically no different than a bunch of useless potted plants. We sit there, incurious, hit a button, and have everything fed to us. We’re no different before the question than we are after it. Fuck that.
Pete Holmes has a joke about life before Google and how Google is ruining our lives. One of the earliest lines in this joke is “We know… everything. But we’re not a lick smarter for it.” He’s right. The joke goes on and describes how since the difference between “knowing” and “not knowing” is indistinguishable because you can instantaneously resolve that tension in your brain, life has become essentially meaningless. It ends with a charming fantasy about the journey you’d have to go on pre-Google to answer the question, “Where’s Tom Petty from?” and what might result from the acquisition of that knowledge.
If you want to re-contextualize this as a life experience, read any biography of a professional athlete. Unless you’re Tom Brady, Nolan Ryan, or some freaky roleplaying outlier like Udonis Haslem or Jamie Moyer, your career is over before you’re 40. All other things being equal, and using average US life expectancy, that means you’ve still got half a lifetime to live, and the thing you’ve dedicated the vast, vast majority of your time, effort and attention to, is now over. You did it. You achieved it. What now? You could have had AI create a story of you as a sports hero that it barfed on you in 5 seconds, but who the fuck gives less than half a shit about that? Except for the absolute dumbest among us.
If you frame the meaning of life through a lens of motivation, I think it accurate to surmise that we all seek meaning and fulfillment, neither of which can be handed to you. This is also why actual artists fucking hate AI with the power of one million suns. AI art is, by definition, devoid of meaning. You plug in a few prompts, the robot autocompletes it, and in seconds you’ve got an end-product. Whoopty shit. In a fully commodified society, where every aspect of our lives is mined for profit, optimization, and efficiency, that’s a satisfactory endpoint.
If you’re reaching for any even slightly higher level of personal fulfillment and achievement, it’s soul-sucking. It’s worthless. It’s disposable fast fashion Shein garbage that briefly passes in front of whoever’s field of vision on its quick and resistance-less path to its ultimate resting place, the dry tomb underneath a barren hellscape of a suburban landfill.
This isn’t to say every attempt we make at anything that can even be partially regarded as “art” deserves to hang in the Louvre, but what I am saying is that the effort does matter and has meaning. I (pretty badly) hand draw logos for our annual Beer Pong tournament. That’s an audience of exactly 15 people. I write a weekly dispatch for a trade association I work for that goes out to just over 2,000 people. In each of those cases, I get overwhelmingly positive feedback from those audiences for my work. Why? Because in everything I create, it’s obvious that this shit is written by me, and me alone. I care about my audience enough – whether it’s 15 people or 2,000 people – not to waste their time with some regurgitated horseshit that took me 3 minutes to make. That (lack of) effort shows utter contempt for them, and I think people understand that on a fundamental level.
I understand that everyone tried to game Google search by making their self-interests appear before everyone else’s self-interests. I’m not naïve like that. But I also knew I could choose my own adventure there by clicking links and going down rabbitholes, if I so chose. Who knows what I might find that I wouldn’t have otherwise if I didn’t just “fart around” as Vonnegut so eloquently puts it. I could be the guy in the video store who found a new favorite movie (or a shitty movie that me and my friends could dunk on for years afterward – win/win!). I could be Kurt Vonnegut buying an envelope. I could be the ultimate curator of my experience.
What Google is now, what AI aspires to be – THIS IS HOW THEY FUCKING SELL IT – is the wholesale replacement for that entire suite of experiences. And this is why the internet will never be the same. It’s because the ones who control all the levers of power that matter do not and will never understand the joy in meandering. In quixotism. In low-key discovery.
I work extremely hard to replicate an internet experience I enjoy, and it gets harder and more expensive every single year. When my friends and I founded Cru Jones Society in 2008, it was an internet of websites. Facebook was comprised almost entirely of poke wars and blurry photos of young people drinking together, Twitter was people posting short, bad jokes and what they had for lunch that day, and if Instagram was around, I wasn’t even aware of it yet.
Our most popular feature was Happy Friday, a weekly compendium of links, commentary, and jokes written with great care each week by my co-founder Jason or myself. And, I don’t even remember how we found all this shit, but we would collect somewhere between 10 and 20 links each week and dedicate a paragraph to them. We had people tell us it was because of us they found stuff like Texts from Last Night, People of Walmart, Fuck You Penguin, Snacks and Shit, FML, FailBlog, and all sorts of other amusing diversions that helped them get through the workday. If it wasn’t stuff like that, it was articles from The AV Club, Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber, or any of a hundred websites filled with real writers just putting their sensibility into the ether. It was all shit where you could go explore for a while if you wanted to. Our website got somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 daily visitors (fucking UNFATHOMABLE to me today), which meant we sent real traffic to a lot of these places, which, in turn, helped these creators get paid. I think that matters.
So, in the spirit of that, here are a list of websites and creators I pay actual money to (or have paid actual money to) that I think are worth your time:
The Onion (I get a print copy every month and it’s easily the funniest part of my month!)
Wikipedia (seriously)
In a previous version of the internet, many of these entities might be able to sustain themselves through ads or search. But that Katie Baker article up above mentioned how several large websites are bypassing Google altogether because the AI enshittification of its product has damaged them so severely.
So I put my money where my mouth is, and I encourage you to do the same. Because the publications I support deserve your time, your attention, and if you can manage it, your money. Don’t like my sensibility? Find a fucking cool creator and pay them. Let them know they make stuff you enjoy! Without that kind of support, the techbro fuckwits win. And their version of the world fucking sucks.
Help me create a better one. Or don’t bitch when we all turn into potted plants.
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